History of this site ?

Gerald Wiley

Gerald Wiley

Lady don't fall backwards
I was wondering about how this place came to be ? Did it start around 2003 ? The home page no longer seems to be updated, although this forum is active.
Just curious.
 
Started as "The Edge Of Darkness" around 1999. Had changed to "Maidenfans" by 2003 when I joined. Original owner/founder Real World left us a few years ago after he started a family. The current owner is Jon, and you'd have to ask him about the home page.
 
Nice. Primitive :bigsmile: How things have changed in such a short space of time.
When did the official Maiden web site go online ? I have never tried it. I know you have to pay, in recent years.... Is that anything to do with why this place started, or just down to a hardcore fan wanting to set up his own site ? I guess most of you use both ?
 
You can look up ironmaiden.com on the wayback machine too to see some of the earlier looks. It goes back to 1998. I guess that's when it came online...Complete with Eddie guestbook and a Eddie Dungeon Java chat :D:D

The official site created the fan club forums I think around 2007? Before that it was just one big free forum for everyone. Then they made the fan club forums too only for members and made them pay forums. So it split people in two camps...those who refused to pay and those who wanted to make the jump to the fan club forum. A lot of fans were very unsatisfied with this and left "in protest" to other sites...like here and maidenfansunited.com (which was set up by fans leaving the official forum) since then the free forum on the official site has been completely removed.
 
For those who don't know: this site used to host The Iron Maiden Commentary, an excellent resource now found at www.ironmaidencommentary.com . The owner of that site, Maverick, was a co-owner of this site when his Commentary was here, and he was a legendary moderator of this forum. Before we got the flood of new members when Maiden started charging for their fan forum, a majority of members here had found their way from the Commentary.

This is why we still have "Iron Maiden Commentary" forums, by the way.
 
There used to be a rivalry of sorts between this site and the official forum. In essence, we thought they were idiots, they thought we were arseholes. So relatively few people were active on both. Since "Maiden Fans United" is a continuation of the former official board, I think the same applies now. (Weren't they the ones who plagiarized our forum rules?)
 
They seem to love trolling and flame wars over there as well.

I've always viewed this site as a great place to hang out with friends that have musical taste in common (mostly ;) ) Other sites feel cold or argumentative.
 
In my occasional forays to read MFU I've found a lot of offensive speak, crude words, homophobia, and other bigotry. And I won't tolerate that, so...I'm cool here.
 
MFU is the sort of place where a thread can hit 5 pages in half an hour, with less than ten words of content.
 
Shadow said:
. In essence, we thought they were idiots, they thought we were arseholes.
Click to expand...
I can do both.

On MFU it's sort of de rigeur to pan everything Maiden has done since the 80s. And yeah, it's full of bigotry. It had lightened up slightly last time I was on, they were trying to get more members because posts had really dried up.
 
My experience with MFU is just like Perun's...From what I've seen when I've gone to the site is: Somebody posts a half serious/half troll topic and the next two pages are just smiley spam.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top